Daily Ageist Attitudes, Subjective Age, and Memory Failures: A Multi-Country Integrated Data Analysis

TL;DR

This study explores how daily ageist attitudes vary across countries and how they relate to memory performance.

Contribution

It introduces a cross-cultural analysis of daily fluctuations in ageist attitudes and their link to memory functioning.

Findings

Daily ageist attitudes vary significantly within individuals across different countries.

In some countries like the US and Germany, higher ageist attitudes correlate with more memory failures.

The relationship between ageist attitudes and memory failures depends on cultural context.

Abstract

Ageist attitudes reflect negative views about others’ aging and are negatively associated with health and well-being. However, the ways in which ageist attitudes may fluctuate on a daily basis, and how those fluctuations are coupled with everyday memory functioning, are underexplored. Applying a cross-cultural perspective and leveraging 14-day daily diary data from the USA, Switzerland, Türkiye, Germany, India, Ukraine, Israel, Austria, Czech Republic, and Canada, the goal of the current study was to identify within-person fluctuations in daily ageist attitudes and connect those fluctuations to everyday memory functioning. Multilevel models were conducted across a mixture of integrated data analysis (for data that could be shared) and coordinated data analysis (standardized models applied to locally controlled data) to maximize the inclusion of countries. Estimates of within-person variability in daily ageist attitudes ranged from 13% (Germany) to 44% (India). Conditional models indicated varying patterns across countries. For example, in the US and Germany, daily increases in ageist attitudes were associated with increases in memory failures (reflecting lower levels of everyday memory functioning). However, in Canada and Türkiye, daily ageist attitudes were not associated with memory failures. The current results suggest that ageist attitudes move to varying degrees on a daily basis, and that their importance for everyday memory functioning may depend on cultural context.